Rebecca Hotchen

What is a ‘broflake’? You may have heard this term bandied around the blogosphere and, increasingly, the online news sites, but what does it mean and where did it come from? Let’s start at the very beginning… In much of the UK, snow is something of a unique phenomenon, but it is the single snowflake […]

Merlin’s beard! Could it really have been twenty years since Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was first published? J.K. Rowling’s series about the boy wizard and his mortal enemy Lord Voldemort has had an unquestionably huge cultural impact across the globe. And as we have seen twice before with muggle and quidditch, the literary […]

With the UK’s general election now just under three weeks’ away, we’ve seen a rise in linguistic creativity in the world of politics. In the last week alone, there has been a flurry of neologisms and extended uses in the news, but how many of those terms will make it into our dictionaries? Here is […]

Deliveroo might be making headlines with their creative avoidance of the word ‘employee’, but here at Oxford Dictionaries we know that inventing euphemisms (and dysphemisms) to refer to workers and their jobs is nothing new. Let’s take a look at some imaginative words for employees already in our dictionaries. Grunts and shiny bums Most people […]

With British Pie Week just behind us, and Americans celebrating pi(e) day on the 14th March (written 3/14 in the US, and thus resembling the first three digits of the number π), there has been a great deal of debate about what makes a pie a pie. Even Mary Berry has stepped on some toes […]

Oxford Dictionaries publishes an update of new entries today (#squadgoals), so let’s celebrate with a chest bump. This is truly a Kodak moment, so maybe it’s time to take a video selfie, and you’d better not untag yourself! Though it might not be the stuff of fitspo, you can still make room for this on your […]

All English speakers learn their ABCs at an early age, and remain quite confident that they know all 26 letters of the English alphabet. However, Old English had a few extra letters that tend to get left out nowadays (as well as using some of the ones we’re familiar with in a slightly different way). […]

One way that language changes is the coinage of terms to describe new versions of existing concepts or inventions, for example the compound electric guitar to differentiate the new invention from the existing type of guitar. However, with electric guitars becoming increasingly widespread, the word guitar no longer unambiguously described one that could be played […]